4 Signs Your Workout is Too Easy

Congratulations! You’ve been working hard on improving your fitness, and now you’ve succeeded, because your workouts are getting easier, faster and you’re becoming way more efficient.

And although it’s something to be proud of, it’s also time to take a step back and make sure they aren’t so easy that you aren’t getting any benefits any more.

Here are 4 ways to tell if your workouts are too easy:

1. You're not sweating

While not every workout has to make you sweat, if you never sweat when you workout, chances are you need to do something different. Whether that means increasing the intensity, increasing the duration or doing a different workout altogether, sweating is a good indicator that your body is working hard and that you are burning calories.

Sweating is also a great form of detoxification and in trying to lose weight, detoxing is important to rid your body of stored toxins, which may cause you to store weight due to your body’s inability to metabolize food properly.

2. It doesn't hurt

On days when I’m not doing speed work for my run, I like to throw in a fast paced last couple of kilometers. My motto is, that if it’s not hurting me and really hard during the last 800 meters, I’m not running fast enough and pushing hard enough and I know I can give it more. I don’t mean pain as in make-me-throw-up, excruciating pain, but pain enough that I don’t want to have to stay in that state for too long and that I know I’m working harder than I did earlier. Don’t be afraid to subject yourself to a little bit of pain and you’ll be able to reap the rewards!

3. You’re not seeing progress any more

When you first started working out, you were so thrilled: the pounds were dropping off, you were feeling better, your clothes weren’t fitting as tight and you had a new sense of self-confidence that you had never experienced before. Lately though, things seem to have slowed down. The scale hasn’t budged in the last week, your pants fit the same and you are losing confidence in your workout abilities instead of gaining. Don’t despair: it may just be that you need to make your workout harder! After repeating the same workout for long enough, the body gets good at it and no longer has to work as hard to yield the results you are after. This translates to you not losing weight any more, you not feeling sore any more, and you essentially hitting a plateau with your progress. Fix it by making your workout harder!

4. You get through it way faster than you used to

While it can be nice to have your workout done quickly and move on to the other important things in your day, if you are finishing up too fast, it may be because you are not actually having much of a workout. Easy movements for your body, which don’t stress or strain it much, don’t take as long and don’t require as long of a recovery in between. This means you finish your workout faster. It also means however that you won’t see the results you are looking for because you will not be working your body hard enough to make progress. Whether you need to add more weight, more reps or more kilometers, adjust accordingly as you get better at your workout and you seem to finishing faster than you used to!

By: Laura Peill – (Check out her blog Chronicles of Passion & Facebook)